Press Release

Allan Stone Projects is pleased to present Wayne Thiebaud: In Black and White, October 23-December 19, 2014. Selected from the Allan Stone Collection, the exhibition will include 20 unique works on paper from 1961-1996, spanning the artist’s full range of subjects, including food, objects, urban and rural landscapes, and figures. The exhibition will be accompanied by a hard-bound, fully illustrated catalog. Carter Ratcliff has written: “rendered in black and white and all the intervening tones, Thiebaud’s drawings lay bare the formal architecture that endows even his most lushly chromatic images with their startling clarity. He is a brilliant draftsman.” The works in this exhibition highlight Thiebaud’s signature motifs and convey the range of process, ingenuity and specificity that distinguishes each of Thiebaud’s works.

Thiebaud has been associated with the Pop art movement of the 1960s primarily because his most celebrated imagery originated from mass-produced commercial goods. However, the reverence and sense of nostalgia with which he conveys his subjects defies such facile categorization. “Thiebaud’s method... has the effect not of eliminating the Pop resonance of his subjects but of slowing down and chastening the associations they evoke, so that a host of ambivalent feelings—nostalgic and satiric and elegiac—can come back later, calmed down and contemplative: enlightened.”(1)

Wayne Thiebaud was born in Mesa, Arizona in 1920. While still in high school, he worked at Walt Disney Studios and later was an artist and cartoonist for the U.S. Air Force. Thiebaud attended San Jose State College (now San Jose State University), followed by Sacramento State College (now California State University, Sacramento), where he received his BA in 1951 and his MA in 1952. He has taught at the University of California at Davis since 1960. Thiebaud received the National Medal for Arts Presidential Award for Teaching from President Clinton in 1994, a 2001 Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Academy of Design, and a 2007 Bay Area Treasure Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Thiebaud has been honored with gallery and museum exhibitions almost every year since 1960. Wayne Thiebaud, now 94, continues to paint in Sacramento, California.